Our sense of belonging to one another—best represented by the bonds of kinship—foreshadows our belonging in the eternal family of God. Our willingness to discipline our desires enough to honor commitments to loved ones prepares us to belong to him who is our Father. As we thus learn to “belong,” we can experience for ourselves the meaning of those searching lines about belonging from “The King of Love My Shepherd Is”:

Perverse and foolish oft I strayed,
But yet in love he sought me,
And on His shoulder gently laid,
And home, rejoicing, brought me.

Another verse of the hymn reads:

I nothing lack if I am His
And He is mine forever.

Belonging can be forever, because love can be forever.

Was Carolyn Hemenway Harman, the mother who buried three husbands, reared two families, and was Relief Society president for eighteen years “liberated”? Many people in today’s society would say no—imagine yielding one’s life in perpetual service to husbands, children, and neighbors whose needs consumed her very life! They might have said to her, “Aunt Carrie, get out from under all that. You’re entitled to a little happiness of your own. It’s time somebody waited on you for a change. Don’t let them do this to you. You don’t belong to them.”

But Aunt Carrie knew better; for the King of Love was her Shepherd. She loved and served him by loving and serving those to whom she fully and freely belonged. She was theirs, and they were hers—forever! In thus belonging, she who gave her life, a day at a time, to serving other people for the Master’s sake also found her life and her liberation; for she came to know the truth, and the truth made her free. May we be wise enough to emulate her.

Not long ago, I saw how the bonds of belonging can cross the generations. Our oldest son was born just after the death of my father, and, in his memory, we gave our son his grandfather’s name as his middle name. For years, this old-fashioned name seemed awkward to our son.

But when he took up debate in high school and learned that his grandfather had been a champion debater for Brigham Young University, our son began to identify with his grandfather. My father had kept a personal journal during much of his adult life, and one day I showed my son an entry describing a debate between BYU and Princeton. I left that volume of the journal with him, and he ended up reading all three volumes.

Some months later, our son worked his way through a particularly trying experience and came to me late at night to tell me what had happened. He said, “Dad, I never knew Grandpa Hafen, but I felt that he was there to help me.”

Not long afterward, as that son was anticipating receiving his mission call, we went to a weekend family reunion in southern Utah. On Sunday afternoon, our son borrowed his grandmother’s car and drove alone to the isolated little canyon where his grandfather had loved to ride his horse—the place, in fact, where he had passed away. At an appropriate spot, my son knelt to pray, asking for the Lord’s help to sort through his questions about his mission and his faith. Something very special then occurred, and at his missionary farewell, he described the deep assurance and new insights he had carried out of the canyon that day.

As I think about those precious personal moments, I have no doubt about the reality of a bond and a sense of belonging between the generations on both sides of the veil. Through these experiences, my son gained a sense of identity and purpose. His tie with the eternal world became more real, and the resulting sense of destiny and mission he felt sharpened his life’s focus and lifted his expectations.

There is something else Joseph accomplished—something that is obliquely suggested by the very difficulty of knowing whether to define the people who now revere him as a church, a religion, a culture, an ethnicity, a global tribe, or something else. Joseph succeeded in creating a community with no real parallel—and few precedents—in the history of the world. The Prophet’s brother Hyrum tried to capture the unique quality of this society when, a few months before Joseph’s death, he said: “Men’s souls conform to the society in which they live, with very few exceptions, and when men come to live with the Mormons, their souls swell as if they were going to stride the planets.”

It is the quality of this community, not its rate of increase, that is the more vital fact—and the more enduring mystery—of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.